How To Catch Big Bass in Spring

There we go. Ooh. Strong fish. That's a real strong fish. Here we go. Give me your face. You've been eating. Man, hooked him right at the roof of the mouth, too. Do you think he wanted that? You've been eating. Took that worm. Here we go. Just saw it swimming off, never felt the bite. Ooh. All right, kid. Let’s not fall over. All right. Let you go.

Hey, folks. Glenn May here with BassResource.com. And today, I want to talk about how to catch big fish or bigger fish during the spring. Big bass is what we're talking about. You know, it's funny every season... You know this. There's several guys that you know that seem to go out, they're always able to catch bigger fish during the spring. I'm like, "How do they do that? What, they got a secret bait that they use, a secret lure? They know these secret hot spots on the lake." I mean, what is it?

Well, I wish it was that easy because it would make things easy to explain, and you can be able to catch larger fish. But the reality is, it's the methodology and approach they use to find and catch larger fish. And that's what I wanna talk about today is using that to go out and get larger fish during the spring.

So, let's talk about really the big fish, and what they do in the spring. Now, everything around the spring focuses around “the spawn”. And a lot of times when we talk about the spawn, it's when all these fish are up shallow. You see beds all over the place. They're about, you know, 1 to 5 feet of water. There's a bunch of bucks out there, and there's beds everywhere, and that's when the spawn is. But the reality is fish spawn several times throughout the spring, you kinda have a wave before that main spawn. You have the main spawn and then another wave after that, as a general rule. Well, the bigger fish are the ones that tend to spawn earlier. They're actually out there spawning when these other fish are just starting to get up on the flats and feeding, and it's active. So, you know, and they also spawn deeper than “the spawn”.

So, a lot of times when the water temperature gets in the early to mid-50s, the low to mid-50s, and the fishing is just starting to pick up, you're out there getting up on the flats. The fish will get in shallow. You know, they're crashing your spinnerbaits and your crankbaits. A lot of times, you can be sitting right on top of the bigger fish that are just about spawning or getting ready to spawn or maybe are spawning. Yeah, they spawn mid-50s. I've seen them in low-50s spawning, in 10 feet of water. It's really an odd thing because you're used to seeing low-60s, that's when “the spawn” occurs, but these bigger ones are out there doing their thing earlier.

So it's really hard to do this because we've been... You know, all winter long, we're not catching a lot of fish. The bite is slow. It finally starts to pick up, we're starting to catch fish. And now, I'm telling you, you know what you need to do, is back off away from those and fish deeper to go after the bigger fish, which is slower, more methodical, a little more difficult because you can't see the fish. You're not fishing in structure that you can readily see or cover that you can readily see, but that's where the bigger girls are and the bigger males are. It's hard to do that. But, this is why there's not that many guys out there catching a lot of big fish. But the ones that do on a consistent basis, that's exactly what they're doing.

So mid-50s, pull off and you're looking at... Here's a flat that deeper drops along those flats where it drops from 5 to 15 feet of water. That's the areas you wanna be looking for. Sometimes there's a secondary flat. What I like to call secondary flat. You got your main flat. It drops down, and then there's another little flat. That lower flat, that's the stuff I wanna look for.

The clearer the water, the deeper those fish are going to spawn. I've seen them spawn as deep as 15 to 20 feet of water in super clear water. But, as a general, 5 to 10 feet instead of in the normal “the spawn,” where they're 1 to 5 feet, they may be 5 to 10, 5 to 15 feet deep.

Fish those drops, look for available cover nearby, be it bushes, shrubs, logs, chunk rock, weeds, weed lines, those are the things you wanna target during this time of year.

Glenn: There we go.

Keri: Got one already

Glenn: Ooh, oh boy!

Keri: Got a big one already.

Glenn: Oh! He came all the way out of the water. Don’t go in the weeds. C’mon baby. Come on out. Don’t go into the weeds.

Keri: Using finesse worms today. Finesse worms

Glenn: Finesse worms

Keri: You got him hooked weird.

Glenn: I got him hooked, but boy. If I could get your face it would be helpful. Ooh! Came right out of my hands. Come here. He’s got a lot of fight in him.

Keri: He’s a little angry

Glenn: Boy. Got that finesse worm just hanging right there. That works.

Keri: There ya go.

Glenn: Alright, let you go.

As for baits, what I like to do, as a general rule, the bigger the fish, they like to bite slower-moving lures. So I like to use a little bit bigger baits and fish them slower. So, I'll use things like a big swim jig with a 6-inch paddle tail on it or some kind of large trailer such as a Rage Tail Space Monkey or something like that to give it some bulk and just, kind of, bounce that real slowly on the bottom. Sometimes I'll just crawl it on the bottom, not give it...not a whole lot of big lifts but crawl it along the bottom, along that cover and structure I mentioned. I take bigger spinnerbaits. I'll throw 3/4-ounce spinnerbaits, white or white and chartreuse with Colorado blades on it, and throw it out there, let it get down to the bottom, and then just barely...just start to crank it just to get it up off the bottom, and let it slowly crawl along the bottom.

Sometimes with those blades, they wanna lift that spinnerbait up, so you may have to kill it every now and then to get it back down to the bottom and then resume your retrieve. Do that a few times to understand how far off the bottom that it gets. Some spinnerbaits will stay on the bottom, others will lift up. So you just have to experiment with the one you have to see which one will stay down there. But that's a bigger bait, that 3/4-ounce bait, and that's what's going to, a lot of times, get a lot of bites from those bigger fish.

I also like to use Texas rigged bites, the bigger creatures baits. Like I mentioned before, a Space Monkey is a really good one to use. A Rooster Tail, those are the bigger type of, you know, the big Rage Hawgs. You know, those 7-inch Rage Hawgs. They're just bigger baits that you can crawl along the bottom to make it look like a lizard or some kind of creature making its way along the bottom nice and slow.

You got to be alert for the bite because it's very subtle. A lot of times, they just come up behind it, and they just suck it up, and they don't move. And you may see a little twitch in your line, and that's it. You won't feel anything at all. So you got to be really alert and watch for that kind of stuff.

But that's how you catch these bigger bass during the spring. I hope those tips help. For more tips and tricks like this, visit BassResource.com.